Admin QuickStart: Labor

While everyone using Hustle does some pretty incredible work, it seems everyone uses the tool just a bit differently. The reason for this is often internal practices, organizational structure, and agent-bases who do the text messaging that you set up.

We’ve broken down the best practices by the general categories Hustle typically works with. While none of these are holy-grails, they certainly had input from each area’s Client Success team to get you up and running as soon as possible, and keep you going for the long haul.

As a Labor Union Admin you are likely working with a fairly stable agent base, and would like to focus on building relationships with your members. Here’s our guide for helping you achieve those goals!

Groups:

Think of groups as the communities of people that you want to reach. The list of folks you want to text over and over again in this one group. If you have a statewide organization, it’s easiest to separate them by geographical regions that hopefully mirror the way your org is structured.

To decide if a member belongs in one group or multiple, think about your Organizational structure. Who is their Union Rep? Do they belong to more than one group within your Organization?

When thinking on how to name your groups, it’s best to do it in a way that will live on after you no longer run the Hustle program. Avoid using “Kat’s Group” or similar, just in case that Union rep changes or the program is given to someone else. Stick to something that mirrors your organizational structure (ie ICU Nurses) or use geographic regions (ie North Chicago).

Orgs:

You will want to create an Org for each local, state affiliate, or regional council. You can also create Orgs based on job type (ie homecare workers, hospital workers, etc)

It’s also important to take integrations you will be using into account.

Integrations:

If you are using VAN, you should use one Hustle Organization per VAN committee for optimal use of the VAN integration.

If you are using the Salesforce integration, you can only link one Salesforce instance to one Hustle organization.

If you use the Blackbaud Luminate Online integration, you can sync multiple Hustle Orgs to one BB LO instance.

Tags:

Tags have many different functions but they are easy ways to have organizers add information to members as they Hustle. Or to split up your list in different ways so you can target goals.

Some Best Practice tags we think everyone should start with are:

Building rep

Steward

Volunteer

Activist

Member

Non-member

Some tags you should add to help you identify opt out reasons:

Wrong number

Hostile

Anti-union

do not contact

Custom Fields:

Custom fields will help you have additional data on the people you are texting such as worksite, job title, member status, and employer. We also encourage folks to bring in the member-specific data into the script so it looks more personal. You also use this data to target goals to specific universes within your groups.

Her are some custom fields we think will help you get started:

Employer

Occupation

Worksite

Job Title

Member Status

Shift

Local Name

Local Number

Store number

Employer

Assignment Strategy:

Some things to think about when choosing an assignment strategy:

Using the Assigned messaging strategy is the preferred method for 1-on-1 communication with members and organizing. You should aim to use the same phone number when texting because Union members have a higher tendency to save the Hustle phone number as “so and so from the Union.” Using assigned messaging to build and maintain that relationship is imperative.

Anyone messaging strategy is very good for large text banks where volunteers and/or staff members are in and out and can’t commit to taking a full set of contacts. This strategy for large pushes that you need to get a lot of messages out the door.

Things to use Hustle for:

External organizing - assigned so folks are texting the same people over and over again from the same phone number

Internal organizing - assigned based on the turf/bargaining unit for each union rep

Text banks - anyone so there is flexibility of anyone being able to text anyone. All replies go into a pool where we any agent can reply. So agents can come and go as they are able to help.

Events/Rallies - anyone assignments help maintain flexibility. You will never have replied to texts! Organizers can send a few texts, or many.